After obtaining a B.E in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters in Mathematics from BITS Pilani in 1986, he received his Masters in Engineering and Ph. D. from Tulane University in New Orleans, U.S.A. He then worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, U.S.A before returning to India in 2007 to teach at IIT Delhi.
His research has focused on using climate models to understand how earth’s climate is affected by natural as well as anthropogenic factors and how it will impact natural and human systems. His interests include regional climate change, attribution of extreme weather events and long-term climate change, climate change risk assessment and adaptation to climate change.
Krishna has been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group-I since 2001 and is a lead author on the upcoming Sixth Assessment Report. He has also been a member of the CLIVAR Scientific Steering Group, Research Advisory Panels of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (Noida), the Editorial Advisory Board for the Elsevier journal “Climate Risk Management”, as well as on numerous national and international review panels.